The virtualization of a data center results in a physical system being virtualized using virtual machines to consolidate the data center infrastructure and increase operational efficiencies. A virtual machine (VM) may be an emulation of computer hardware. For example, the VM may operate based on computer architecture and functions of computer hardware resources associated with hard disks or other such memory. The VM may emulate a physical computing environment, but requests for a hard disk or memory may be managed by a virtualization layer of a host machine to translate these requests to the underlying physical computing hardware resources. This type of virtualization results in multiple virtual machines sharing physical resources.
The physical systems and virtual systems (e.g., virtual machines) may each have a state that can be persisted and stored as an image. The state of a physical system may be stored as a hard disk image and the hard disk image may be used to configure one or more other physical systems. The state of a virtual machine may be stored as a virtual machine disk image and may be used to run one or more virtual machines. Either type of image may contain the state of the system at a point in time and may be updated to reflect changes that occur to the system over time.